Computing devices are growing increasingly ubiquitous. As such, an increasing amount of data is being consumed and stored by users. Data is stored on physical computer-readable storage media as an organized collection of data, commonly referred to as a database. Databases are often used to store data that can be made accessible to users. One common type of database is a relational database, in which a number of tables are linked by relationships between the stored data entries. In some databases, unique keys are used to identify rows within some of these tables.
Conventional databases typically employ an “update-in-place” process for updating records in a database. When a record in the database is modified, an update-in-place process will typically overwrite the physical block of the storage device holding the previous record with the updated version of that record. The update-in-place process works well with legacy storage devices (e.g. Hard Disk Drives (HDDs)). Append-only storage devices (e.g. Solid State Drives (SSDs)) offer a number of advantages over legacy HDDs, including improved read and write speed performance and reduced power consumption. Consequently, modern data centres are increasingly incorporating append-only storage devices. Append-only storage devices, however, are not well-suited for use with legacy database systems.